The 15-Year Detour: How the Data Industry Spent Billions Reinventing SQL

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Somewhere around 2020, the data world quietly arrived at a conclusion that Teradata engineers could have told you in 1984: SQL on a massively parallel architecture is a pretty good way to process large volumes of data. The path to get there was anything but quiet. It involved billions in capital, an entire generation of …

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Improving SQL Performance with Simple Query Rewrites: Dealing with Duplicates and Business Calendars

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The Teradata flavor of SQL is still, in principle, a declarative language. Hence, there can be multiple ways to describe an SQL query and achieve the same result. While the answer is the same, Teradata may use a completely different execution plan based on how the query is expressed. One approach is investing in heavy …

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Negative Impact of Applying Functions to Join Columns in Teradata Joins: Performance Implications and Solutions

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Functions on Join Columns and Their Impact on Teradata Performance In many Teradata systems, developers apply functions directly in join conditions to work around data-model inconsistencies.While this approach might seem harmless, it can dramatically affect optimizer decisions and query performance — and often reveals deeper data-model issues. Example of a Problematic Join Applying functions to …

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Teradata TD_WhichMax and TD_WhichMin Functions: A SQL Solution for Finding Min/Max Value of a Column with Low Resource Consumption

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What is the Teradata TD_WhichMax Function? Teradata releases new SQL features with each update, providing enhanced functionality and improved performance with reduced resource usage. We will examine the Teradata TD_WhichMax and TD_WhichMin functions and explore their potential benefits. These functions retrieve the minimum or maximum value of a column and are commonly utilized in SQL …

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Date ranges and business calendars beyond recursion and Teradata SYS_CALENDAR

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In a previous article, Roland explained how to use recursion to build a data range without touching a physical table. This time, we explore an alternative approach that avoids recursion at the expense of single-AMP, single-row access. We can use this approach to build both a wide date range as well as a narrow one. We …

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Teradata – Merging two change history tables

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Have you encountered a poorly designed physical data model where object columns are distributed randomly across tables, and you wish to unify them in their rightful place? Merging non-historical tables is simple, but the process becomes more complex when historization is applied to at least one of the tables. Change history tables are typically complex. …

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Teradata Set Operators: Understanding UNION vs. UNION ALL for Peak Performance Optimization

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In this article, we will delve into the world of Teradata set operators, exploring their functionality, applications for attaining peak performance, and the optimization techniques employed by Teradata. Teradata UNION vs. UNION ALL What sets UNION apart from UNION ALL in Teradata? The Teradata UNION operator combines the results of two or more queries, removing …

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Teradata SQL Tuning: How Query Rewriting Can Reduce Runtime from 40 Minutes to Seconds

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It’s time to share a new Teradata SQL tuning case study that showcases the impressive impact of query rewriting on performance. We are studying the query below that originally took 40 minutes to run. As a SQL tuning specialist, I always prioritize adding missing statistics and refreshing stale ones. I analyzed the SQL statement that …

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